Tales From The Ulysses
by The Kapok Kid
Summary: A wildly varied series of tumblr drabbles for Alistair MacLean's HMS Ulysses Currently: Croydon was entirely destroyed in the landmine of 1943. The result did not beggar description.


_A/N: I am unable to ascertain exactly when convoy PQ17 took place. I have placed it in the late spring of 1943, well before the destruction of the Tirpitz._

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Curtains

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Croydon was entirely destroyed in the landmine of 1943. The result did not beggar description – a shambles of twisted steel and wire, a shattered mass of concrete and mortar, and all around the town, closely shrouding the smoking ruins, lay a blood red pall of finely disintegrating brick powder. Those of the townspeople who had been fortunate enough to survive – having been away at the time of the tragedy – could not bring themselves to look upon the photographs of the aftermath without sickness and revulsion broiling white-hot in the pits of their stomachs.

But inevitably, slowly and steadily, as dawn came down, as morning follows the night, however bitter and acrimonious the darkness had been, so did a better dawn greet Croydon. The town was rebuilt. Not in an instant nor in the span of a single night, as newspapers of the day claimed, but at snail's pace, laboriously, with the blood and sweat and tears of a thousand.

Then the town-council declared there should be graveyards, so graveyards they made. Two large, undulating meadows of the softest grass, laid in with rows of granite headstones. They lay on either side of the town square, one to the east, the other facing the west. On the faces of the western headstones they carved in the 238 names of the people who died in the bombing, and on the eastern headstones were the names of Croydon's soldiers fallen in the war -26 names in all.

And people come in their droves and laid flowers and letters at the feet of those they loved. Not a day goes by when families would not gather in clusters at the headstones to pray, to talk, or to simply sit in silence. Each Sunday a hymn is sung for them, each year the memorial is held beneath the spreading chestnuts that grow in the middle of each field. And as the years roll round, the meadows ceased to be the place of death, and began to revive, to spring back to life.

Almost, but not quite.

Towards the end of both graveyards, in alphabetical order, are two forgotten corners, seven forgotten gravestones.

Three are in the meadow for warriors, and these hidden three are the best soldiers –nay, sailors, of all. _Captain Michael Ralston, RNS, Master HMS Vytura,_ is inscribed upon the first, and immediately following this are the two graves of his sons, Michael Ralston Junior, Able Seaman and LTO, and William Ralston, Ordinary Seaman, Stoker. The engraved dates of death show them to be only twenty-one and eighteen when they died. And in the opposite meadow are the graves of their mother, Marjorie, well-loved schoolteacher, and their three young sisters, the oldest no more than twelve when they all perished in that devastating blast.

Thirty three years have passed since the bombing, thirty since the erection of the headstones. And still the crowds come daily, the graves are clean and tidy, and such embellishments as can be afforded by their families are carved into the stone.

Except for the Ralstons.

Those seven graves remain empty, devoid of all adornment except the initial lettering. For they are the last in the line, there is no family to follow them; no person to lay flowers at their feet. But spring brings with it fresh winds to sweep the deadened leaves off the slabs, lively buds of yellow and white thrive in the soft, damp earth, and ivy grows a curling pattern down the headstones. In summer come more flowers, profuse and colourful further still, and autumn brings its own riot of reds and ambers to liven their eternal rest, and winter grows its sparkling icicles of crystal to hang in bowers from the stones.

Weather-beaten by decades in the sun and rain and frosts, they stand still proudly back to back, dipping in salute to east and west, to each sunrise and sunset.

And so they shall stand for another thirty years, until time completes its work, until the war and the bombing and the arctic convoys are forgotten, done and dusted, buried in history books with the rest of the past. Then they shall recede into the earth, into the bosom of the land that spawned them, and all that shall remain are seven posts of granite, hidden forever behind gently-swinging curtains of ivy.


End file.
